Tabla de contenidos para No. 93 en Screen Education

Our world was much larger then. The forest went on forever. We tree spirits nurtured the harmony of all living things, but our closest friends were humans. Then, as sometimes happens, the balance of nature shifted and Hexxus – the very spirit of destruction – rose up from the bowels of the Earth and rained down his poison. The forest was nearly destroyed. Many lives were lost, and the humans fled in fear, never to return. Most think they didn’t survive. It was only by calling up the magical powers of nature that I was able to trap Hexxus inside an enchanted tree and save FernGully. — Magi Lune (Grace Zabriskie) FernGully has been protected for many years by Magi Lune, a wise rainforest fairy with strong powers. In the…

• It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) draws on tropes of the slasher film in order to re-evaluate questions of gender and the status of the female ‘victim/hero’ figure. • The ‘new wave’ of slasher-inflected horror films is rejuvenating a tired generic formula – see works like Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016) and Happy Death Day (Christopher Landon, 2017). These films mobilise generic slasher tropes in the service of caustic sociopolitical commentary: Get Out scrutinises modern race relations in America, while the latter two humorously play with female representation. • The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) places female experience at the heart of its narrative, in which a grieving woman struggles to reconcile her ruptured psychological state with her role as a mother.…

In both the original Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988) and Jason Micallef’s 2018 television reimagining, the student body of Westerburg High are faced with an unexpected quandary. Heather Chandler (Melanie Field in the series / Kim Walker in the film), like most queen bees in cinema, television and literature, rules her school with an iron fist, maintaining her power through bullying and nastiness hidden under a thin facade of good intentions. So, when it is announced that she has apparently taken her own life, the student body is left scrambling. What is the right way to react? Am I demonstrating the correct amount of grief? Then, less visibly: Will things perhaps get better now that she’s gone? And who will fill the power vacuum? At the core of it all, however…

A lejandro González Iñárritu’s award-winning 2014 film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is many things: a realistic insight into the backstage machinations of a Broadway show; a raw and sometimes surrealistic exploration of one man’s psyche; a comment on the relative value placed on different forms of entertainment; a comment on the nature of ‘talent’; a tale of redemption. It’s also frenetic, deep and thoroughly entertaining at the same time, due in no small part to two main elements: the brave and show-stopping performance by Michael Keaton in the lead role, supported by a flawless ensemble cast; and the film’s ‘no edits’1 appearance and shooting methodology. Birdman also offers a great opportunity to explore the concept of metafiction; as Keaton has stated in an interview about the film,…

In the first two minutes of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017), we are presented with both the crushing boredom and joyful chaos of childhood. The establishing shot introduces us to six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Scooty (Christopher Rivera). The two young companions lean listlessly against a garish, mauve-coloured building: Moonee, in a bright yellow T-shirt, restlessly tapping her feet together as Scooty stares off screen, lost in his own thoughts. This lethargic reverie is suddenly interrupted by another child, Dicky (Aiden Malik), who runs up and breathlessly informs them of the arrival of ‘freshies’ at a nearby motel, Futureland. Instantly animated by this news, the children leap up, screaming in unison, and run off to taunt the new tenants. Kool & the Gang’s ‘Celebration’ kicks in as…

Simon of the Desert is an appropriate text for senior secondary students, and may relate to learning outcomes in History, Media Arts, Philosophy and Spanish. It is recommended that teachers watch the film beforehand to gauge its appropriateness for use as a classroom resource. Schools are also advised that Simon of the Desert contains brief nudity and mild coarse language. The film has a running time of forty-three minutes, and is in Spanish. It is available on DVD with English subtitles internationally through The Criterion Collection. A very simple but cryptic film, Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel, 1965) has a plot that is both narratively straightforward and conceptually complex. Loosely based on hagiographical texts, it tells the story of Saint Simeon Stylites (in Buñuel’s film, named Simón and played…

Island of the Hungry Ghosts (Gabrielle Brady, 2018) begins with the sounds of Christmas Island: birds, cicadas, a man screaming. He’s jumped over a wire fence and, as he runs, his yells get louder, before the film abruptly cuts to a car navigating a winding road walled by dense foliage. A woman is driving; she has the radio news playing in the background. ‘A two-day police search has ended with the discovery of a man’s body at the bottom of a cliff at one of the island’s remote beaches,’ the newsreader intones. ‘Authorities have not released the man’s name, but it is believed that he was a detainee on the offshore facility on Christmas Island for more than five years.’ Is he the same man? Was that first scene real,…

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. – 1 Timothy 2:5–61 Would that it were so simple. – Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) in Hail, Caesar! ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ Jesus said when asked about the ethics of paying taxes, ‘and to God the things that are God’s.’2 It would be easy to suppose that, in Hail, Caesar! (2016), the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are themselves paying their debts to the powers that be. By their standards, this looks like a crowd-pleaser all the way: a nostalgic, colourful light comedy with an all-star cast, a loose episodic format and a couple of extravagant musical…

There is likely no celebrated masterpiece of cinema so troubling and controversial as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). Now over eighty years old, the film remains on school lists as a touchstone for questions relating to early-twentieth-century history, documentary form, cinematography and the aesthetics of propaganda. It is a widely acknowledged masterpiece of cinema, but also a terrifying expression of Nazism. As a document of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, Triumph of the Will utilises an astonishing array of techniques and stylistic devices to present a vast cinematic window into the deranged and feverish cultural atmosphere of early Nazi Germany. To what extent the film’s artistic values can be distinguished from its depraved ideological function is the central concern of this article. Riefenstahl was still in…

I always believe in following the advice of the playwright [Victorien] Sardou. He said, ‘Torture the women!’ … The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough. – Alfred Hitchcock1 Hitchcock’s oft-quoted statement expresses a sentiment that predates cinema; Edgar Allan Poe famously claimed that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’.2 And let’s not forget Italian giallo-horror maestro Dario Argento s : I women, especially ones. they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man.’3 And here we have the troubling tension that pulses away at the heart of the horror flick. It is the blood-curdling scream of a woman staring down death that is…

If one is to define media representation as a construction of reality, then animation is no exception. With codes and conventions writ large on the screen, animation can be a great resource for Media educators seeking to demonstrate how meaning can be created both technically and symbolically. However, animation can also do much more than this. Through the deliberate way that it is constructed, along with how it depicts reality in an exaggerated manner, the animated film is unique not only in how it constructs meaning but also in how it plays with and subverts audience expectations. Reality and artifice One of the primary aims of the animator is to replicate reality by making the unreal look real. They learn to imitate the nature of physics to make virtual objects…

At the Oscars ceremony in 1982, Best Screenplay winner Colin Welland waved his award and announced: ‘The British are coming!’1 Several decades ago, however, when I was talking to stage and film director Lindsay Anderson, who has a cameo in Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), he said: ‘You know, there was not a penny of British money in it.’2 The film seemed such a quintessentially British achievement that I found this hard to believe. There was apparently some controversy relating to the role of the British-based company Goldcrest Films, which had been described as the ‘maker’ or ‘producer’ of the film. A formal statement in 1986 claimed that ‘Allied Stars and Twentieth Century-Fox jointly financed the total cost of production of Chariots of Fire’,3 with no reference to the…